Inua Ellams Quotes

She asked why it happens? Keeps happening? What exact regime teaches males to take what isn’t given? What riles them?

We played like a dead French kiss reincarnated as a saxophone with tendencies to hiss galaxophonic secrets through the tombs of trombones reborn as the lower bones of Bojangles, dancing on base drums prancing like songs of the railroad set free, we played like freedom, stirring on those hills reflected in the back heels of a dancer in New Orleans tapping prosperity

Fuck / Our Future When our scorching planet ignites the last evacuating airship to cook its soft cargo of human flesh in an expanding fireball and fragments of its propeller blades thunk inches deep into tree trunks in the straggling forest beneath / What I want to know is which will survive / which strain / which wood grain will hold encoded / like a fingerprint pushed into wet clay / that final day of reckoning when this cerulean blue ordained world we have corroded a toxic grey / begins its self-reclamation starting with that tree / a lone lieutenant / a desperate sentinel / erect / through the falling ball of fire / het fuel and smouldering meat / its face of leaves weighed with dust / its waist of branches noosed in plastic bags / yet standing stubborn in its shaggy majesty / admist the ship’s carnage / like a righteous middle finger thrust at all humanity / proud in the snarling sky

The poem "Fuck / Our Future" (p. 49): When our scorching planet ignites the last evacuating airship to cook its soft cargo of human flesh in an expanding fireball and fragments of its propeller blades thunk inches deep into tree trunks in the straggling forest beneath / What I want to know is which will survive / which strain / which wood grain will hold encoded / like a fingerprint pushed into wet clay / that final day of reckoning when this cerulean blue ordained world we have corroded a toxic grey / begins its self-reclamation starting with that tree / a lone lieutenant / a desperate sentinel / erect / through the falling ball of fire / jet fuel and smouldering meat / its face of leaves weighed with dust / its waist of branches noosed in plastic bags / yet standing stubborn in its shaggy majesty / amidst the ship’s carnage / like a righteous middle finger thrust at all humanity / proud in the snarling sky

His heart is a gnarled knuckle now